Should we be excited about the Booker longlist?

Around this time of year—in part because there isn't much else going on—literary types always start having the "Who is going to make the longlist?" conversation. They mean the Booker longlist, which is announced in mid-August. Until a few years ago, the longlist (of around 20 books) was never made public; one simply got to know of the six novels that made the shortlist. Why did this change? Presumably for publicity reasons: the publication of the longlist is another "event" in the time-line of the prize, providing yet more opportunities for news stories, gossip etc. It also gives publishers another puffy thing to write on dust jackets, although exactly how many extra copies of a novel are likely to be sold because the words "Longlisted for the Booker Prize" appear is anyone's guess. (20? 50?) To my mind, it all seems a bit unseemly. Do we really need to know that Martin Amis's Yellow Dog didn't even make the 2003 longlist (as we were repeatedly told at the time)? It's not as if there are so many brilliant novels published in any given year that the revelation as to who did and who didn't make the longlist provides any real insights into the prize, the nature of our literary culture, or anything else. Prizes, if they are to have gravitas, should cultivate a certain mystique. Ideally, a winner should simply be announced, as if by divine decree. The less known about the judges and what they've been up to the better. The Booker, in other words, should become more like the Nobel.

Having said that, we are stuck with the longlist, and so the question might as well be asked: who is going to make it this year? Ian McEwan is surely a shoo-in with On Chesil Beach. Other than that, the field seems unusually wide open. There haven't been that many stand-out novels published in the last year. This August and September see new novels from Hari Kunzru, Jonathan Coe, J M Coetzee (twice winner of the prize) and Jeanette Winterson—all are fairly good bets for the longlist at least (novels published up until the end of September are eligible for this year's prize). I would be pleased to see Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist make the longlist, and even the shortlist—it's an excellent novel about having an identity that is torn between east and west, and it deserved to receive more attention than it did. Other than that, I really can't say. But I would be disappointed if Ian McEwan won the prize a second time, once again for one of his less impressive novels.